“He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.” (Luke 1:52)
Because we’ve heard it so many times, it can be easy to miss the fact that Jesus enters the world during a time of authoritarianism and political violence — a time of soldiers in the streets. Soldiers don’t gather around the manger, but they lurk on the edges of the story. Herod’s bloodlust is just around the corner, and it is soldiers who will carry out his revenge.
In that way, our present moment in this country is not so different from first-century Palestine. In Chicago, ICE has kidnapped our immigrant neighbors, teargassed those who would resist them, and has generally acted with impunity as a secret police force. Like in the nativity story, national guard soldiers lurk at the edges, held at bay only by a court system that has ruled their deployment unlawful.
With Herod and his foot soldiers skulking about, you would they hold all the power. But that is not the case. It is the infant in a manger who holds the power in this story. Before the manger, bloodlust and cruelty are unmasked as having nothing to do with the vision that God is bringing into the world through Jesus. They are rendered powerless.
God could have come into the world clothed in imperial purple or riding a tank, but Jesus arrives as a defenseless child — pretty much the exact opposite of the images of political power offered by Herod and the White House. In our present moment, this administration seems to value brute force and cruelty, but God imagines a different kind of world.
Rev. Michael Woolf is detained by Illinois State Police during a protest outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, on Nov. 14, 2025. (Jim Vondruska/Reuters)
That is a world worth fighting for with everything we have, including using our most sacred symbols and in physically standing between menacing forces and their intended targets. This Advent, we are invited to prepare ourselves anew for this reversal of power. Are we ready? Doing so means that we must think in new ways about our own power and how to use it.
It must have seemed hopeless in first-century Palestine for plenty of people, but that is where the light of the world chooses to be born. God is still coming into being, even amidst the cruelty of ICE and the terror of state violence. We have the chance to be a part of God’s vision of a new heaven and a new earth. The only question is whether we are ready to say yes to a new kind of power.
Rev. Michael Woolf is the senior minister of Lake Street Church of Evanston in Illinois. His forthcoming coauthored book, Confronting Islamophobia in the Church: Liturgical Tools for Justice, is available for pre-order now.
NOTE: This is part of our Unsettling Advent devotionals running Nov. 30-Dec. 24. You can subscribe for free and receive them each morning in your inbox.
